Mark Murphy explains the no homework meeting: teams complete work together during the meeting using real-time tools like Google Docs instead of leaving with follow-up assignments. It cuts down on post-meeting busywork and works especially well for remote teams.
I want to suggest a new kind of meeting for you to try, and it's called a no homework meeting. Here's how it works. When you think about how a lot of us normally have meetings, team meetings for example, we gather together as a group, we come in, we talk about our work a little bit, and then we divide up the work and each of us takes an assignment and we go off back to our desk and we go work on our particular individual assignment. Right? That's a very normal way of working. And for those of you my age and older, you know, mid-40s and up, this is kind of how we were trained to work. But if you take a look at our millennials in the workplace and how they came up through high school, college, etc., they have a very different way of operating. And it's actually catching on a bit now. And it's called a no homework meeting, a no homework team. The way it works is instead of coming into a room discussing your work at a high level, then dividing it up and everybody goes off their separate ways. You actually come into a room or on a conference call. You can do this over the phone, over video chat. It actually works great over that kind of medium. You come together and you actually sit there with all of the work and you say, we're gonna leave the room or leave the call when we've completed our work. So let's say you're working on a big proposal. And you're going to revamp some new technology in your company. Great. You come together. The old way of doing a team, you'd come together, discuss the technology, then everybody would take a piece, go off back to their desk and finish it. A no homework team, you come in, you bring the proposal, and you all sit there together and work on the proposal. Literally. Here's line 1. You know what? I think we should change this first paragraph. Oh, you go ahead and do that. Great. Doo doo doo doo doo. Type it up. Change the first paragraph. Oh, let's look at paragraph 2. How does this impact our pricing? Oh, well, let's roll up our sleeves. Let's all work on this together. Together so that by the time you're done with it, when you leave, you don't have to go back to your desk and do your homework because there is no homework because you did all of the work together collaboratively. And what's made this really cool is there are a bunch of new technologies. Think of Google Docs now, for example. It allows real-time simultaneous editing of a document. You can open up like a word processing document and actually watch each other type, 10 people. Can be around the world working on this document and they can watch each other typing in the document. Oh, here, I want to delete this line and add this line in. Wonderful. Microsoft now has an alternative that does the same exact thing. There are lots of technologies that allow you to simultaneously collaborate. And what it does is instead of everybody going off their separate ways, and this is especially important for dispersed workforces, for remote employees, instead of everybody going off their own separate ways, Now what you have is a way of collaborating such that when you all get off the meeting, when everybody leaves, there's no homework. You've actually done all the work already. I'm not going to suggest you make every meeting a no homework meeting, but I will suggest for those of you who are like me, who grew up in the let's go off our separate ways and work independently, every so often, maybe once a month, once every two months, Try a no homework team and it will radically change how you interact with your peers.
